At least, that's what it feels like sometimes. First there are all the students in my writing class that can't seem to read the assignment instructions I give them so they get all confused and make life more difficult for themselves (seriously - I cannot figure out what is so hard to understand about "Go to this website (with URL) and click on the link at the bottom of the page; download the data you find there and make a graph" but two students went and got data from random other places). Then today, I gave my first exam in my principles class and I don't know if it's test anxiety or laziness or what, but over and over again, students would come up and ask me about some question and because they were asking something that was obvious in the question itself, I just literally read the question out loud to them, at which point they would say, "OH! I get it now!" and I would think to myself, "You do?!?" One of my TAs suggested that they were probably just fishing to see if I would give them additional information and when it was clear I wasn't going to, they would give up. I can believe that but I also think that a lot of them literally don't read, or at least, they don't read very carefully. This has happened in past semesters too but it seemed a lot worse today. I just don't get it.
I came across an interesting discussion about a 19-year-old intern who was fired from The Gazette in Colorado Springs for plagiarism. There appears to be some controversy over the fact that the editor publicly named the girl in a letter to readers (explaining and apologizing for the plagiarism), with some people saying that doing so was unduly harsh because this incident will now follow her for the rest of her career. I was intrigued by this discussion for two reasons - one, it seems pretty clear to me that this was not a case of ignorance (as I have often encountered with my own students who have no idea how to paraphrase or cite correctly) and two, putting aside the offense itself, I have often struggled with how to handle situations where there are long-term repercussions for a student, repercussions that lead the overall costs to be far higher than might seem warranted for the specific situation. As an example of the latter issue, I have occasionally taught seniors who need to p
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